Costs and Benefits of Stem Cell Research and Treatment: Media Presentation and Audience Understanding in Hungary

This study examined the press coverage and audience understanding of the costs and benefits of stem cell research/treatment in Hungary. A content analysis of five newspapers and a focus group study was conducted. The way participants talked about the costs and benefits in many aspects echoed the dominant framing of the issue in the press (medical benefits = main benefit, high expense of treatment = dominant negative aspect). Even though participants applied analogical reasoning to formulate some risks that were missing from the reporting on stem cells, many gaps of the media coverage were echoed in gaps in lay discussions.

Adaptation and change in organizational learning research

To understand the role of organizational learning in the organization’s endeavor to overcome challenges, organizational learning research need to be spread out to the field of adaptation and change. This paper is the first part of a bigger empirical research, a literature review that examines the link between these topics and search for gaps in prior literature. However, these phenomena are closely related in the prior literature, the thinking about organizational learning is rather idealistic than reflective and there are still research gaps regarding the following questions: (1) Is there a need to examine internal organizational challenges from the organizational learning perspective? (2) How can the earlier organizational adaptation be characterized using the constructs of organizational learning? (3) Is the earlier adaptation process or organizational learning process always good and useful for the organization? Based on reviewing prior literature the author formulated an own organizational learning definition and identified future research directions in order to fill these gaps.